Bicycling

“For 7000 years,” says Mikael Colville-Anderson, “streets were the most democratic space in the history of Homo sapiens.”

Nearly everything that could be done in public could be done safely in city streets. People walked and talked and argued, children played, markets and festivals were set up – and if a horse-drawn wagon needed a bit of extra room for passage, that could be negotiated too. Except in times of war, carelessly stepping out into a street did not bring the risk of a sudden violent death.

That all changed in western societies in just a few decades, Colville-Andersen said, when the rapidly growing automobile industry launched a successful public relations campaign. “Jay-walking” was painted as a dangerous, foolish and anti-social activity, while the new profession of traffic engineering focused on streamlining streets to facilitate the speedy and steady movement of cars.

Colville-Andersen was speaking in Toronto on February 27 at the Ontario Good Roads Association annual conference. Kudos to the OGRA for bringing him in as a featured speaker, along with panelists Jennifer Keesmaat, Chief Planner for the city of Toronto, and Taras Grescoe, author of Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile. (in top photo, clockwise from left, Colville-Andersen, Keesmaat and Grescoe)

The discussion focused on the best urban transportation design practices in the world – while also raising difficult questions about why many cities have lacked the political will to implement rational design.

Canadian by birth, Colville-Andersen lives in Denmark and has established an international consulting practice, Copenhagenize Design Co. His firm helps cities around the world in implementing pro-pedestrian and pro-bicycling policies, when they are ready to move away from an overwhelming reliance on cars for everyday transportation.

Design played a big role in cementing the dominance of cars in our reshaped cities by specifying wider – and faster – turning radiuses; ring roads, multi-lane arterial roads and even expressways built right through old neighbourhoods.

The predictable result, Colville-Andersen says, is that most urban dwellers do not feel safe biking on city streets. Just as predictably, he says, biking rates go up rapidly as soon as a usable network of safe infrastructure is established.

It is useless, he said, to exhort people to bike for the sake of their own health or for the health of the environment. In Copenhagen, where more than half the people bike to work or education each day (compared to 14% who routinely travel in cars), neither personal health nor the environment rank high as a motivating factor.

Instead, repeated polls have found that most people choose to bike simply because that’s the quickest and most convenient way to get around Copenhagen.

And that’s no accident – it reflects a 40-year-old prioritizing of active transportation, with the goal of making walking and biking safe and convenient, while making driving less convenient.

At left is traffic engineering as practiced in most wealthy cities for the past 60 years. Cartoonish in its simplicity, it nevertheless summarizes what many people experience daily. Bike networks are disjointed snippets of little use to commuters on bike. Sidewalks and other walking routes also include frequent jogs to accommodate motorways. Bus routes have continuous runs but often wind around cities wasting their occupants’ time – while car and truck routes are made as straight and fast as feasible.

At right is the prioritizing exhibited in Copenhagen. Bike routes and walking routes are made as convenient and efficient as possible, with public transit routes next in priority. Meanwhile many jogs, detours, narrow lanes and other traffic calming designs intentionally slow motor traffic. This not only makes biking and walking much safer in those inevitable intersections, but also gives drivers daily incentives to stop using their costly and slow cars.

A question of design, or a question of power?

The “best practice” biking infrastructure designs that have evolved in Copenhagen and other European cities result in high rates of cycling, more just societies and more convivial cities. But the political vision required to even consider the Copenhagen approach was a contentious topic in the panel discussion that followed Colville-Andersen’s speech.

In Toronto, far from being willing to intentionally impede car traffic, successive city councils have approved very modest extensions of bikeways only when they have been assured that the bike lanes will not significantly slow down car traffic.

For example, when council debated adding “protected bike lanes” to two busy one-way streets downtown, Mayor John Tory was cautiously supportive “as long as the cycle tracks don’t interfere with commuters”. It was Chief Planner Jennifer Keesmaat who recounted this anecdote, and who also drew out the implication that in the Mayor’s way of thinking only the car drivers counted as “commuters”.

A recently installed bike lane on Adelaide Street in downtown Toronto. The partially protected bike lane resulted in an immediate jump in bike traffic. But it is also the subject of frequent complaints about taxis and delivery vehicles which cut around the widely spaced bollards and park in the cycle lane – forcing cyclists to swerve out into the traffic.

Thus while Keesmaat enthusiastically backed the major thrust of Colville-Andersen’s design approach, she also emphasized the difficult task of building a political constituency for cycling, so that councils become willing to support transformative action.

The frustration with the glacially slow growth of Toronto’s bicycle routes became especially clear in the question period. One long-time cycling advocate angrily told the panelists they were all missing the point: “we have an automotive industry in this province that dictates how Toronto runs.”

Indeed, auto manufacturing has long been a dominant industry in the province of Ontario, a force to be reckoned with by all political parties. Even the nominally left-wing New Democrats are reluctant to back any measure that could cost jobs in auto manufacturing, as the auto workers union has been one of their most important constituencies.

In an economic system where anything other than steady growth is seen as failure, it is hard to imagine Ontario municipal leaders telling the auto industry “we’re going to intentionally slow down car traffic throughout our cities, so that large numbers of drivers stop driving and switch to walking or biking. Your car sales will go down a lot, but you’ll just have to deal with it.”

When Copenhagen embarked on its transportation transition 40 years ago, the local power dynamics were likely far different. Not only did the transition begin during the oil price spikes of the 1970s, but Denmark had no major automotive or petroleum industries at the time. Copenhagen may have been under the influence of car culture, but the car industry apparently did not have the same financial and political clout that it wields in many other cities or regions.

By the same token, the design approach to bicycle urbanism may turn out to be an important but passing phase. The current design approach, after all, generally amounts to gradually carving out small protected lanes alongside the much larger proportion of urban streets that remain the province of cars.

If fossil fuels don’t remain cheap in coming decades, and the car economy coughs and wheezes until it no longer dominates civic life, there may be no need to set aside small “safe spaces” on city streets. With only a few cars and trucks on city streets there may be no need for separate bike lanes, because the streets will once again become the democratic spaces they were for 6900 of the past 7000 years.

In the meantime, however, we welcome every step forward in providing safe infrastructure, and every additional rider who feels comfortable biking as a result.

The fifth annual Winter Cycling Congress, held February 8–10 in Montréal, brought together 375 participants from nine countries and included dozens of presentations and workshops.

It would be impossible to cover the whole Congress in one blog post, but one way to summarize the progress of winter biking would be with this, only partly tongue-in-cheek, exhortation:

“Take heart, stalwart cyclists – The Suits have arrived!”

While the momentum of all-season cycling has been building slowly for decades, progress has accelerated greatly in the past ten years. One result is that city governments across the northern hemisphere are working not only to add new cycling infrastructure, but to keep the bike lanes cleared and safe through the winter.

The Winter Cycling Congress included presentations by several professional consulting firms who design cycling infrastructure in northern cities, villages and rural areas, addresses by big city mayors and members of Parliament, plus input from maintenance experts with experience in widely varying climates.

Can you ride through the winter? Yes, you can.

While bikes have obvious appeal as healthy, low-energy, sustainable transportation tools, in many countries the bicycle’s positive impact will remain limited if people feel they can’t ride in the winter months. If city planners try to build adequate infrastructure for large numbers of cyclists in summer, but still need to accommodate all residents via alternate transport methods in winter, then our overall transport systems will remain costly and inefficient.

What are the main barriers to wider adoption of winter cycling? First, let’s deal with a common, silly objection: people can’t ride when it’s cold. This is absurd because people happily do many other activities outside in winter: ice skating, hockey, snowboarding and skiing, for example. Furthermore, all preceding generations up until about 100 years ago managed to get around in winter without being chauffeured in heated canisters. Dressing for the weather is not rocket science – our Neanderthal forebears were able to figure it out.

So when the cheap gas and diesel run out and there is no choice but to adapt to a low-energy transport system, humans will once again rise to the challenge of putting on long underwear and warm hats, without considering themselves heroes for doing so.

Today there are planning consultants gathering data in many cities, asking what are the major factors that keep people biking in the winter, and what factors make them stop.

Tony Desnick of Alta Planning discussed the results of an international survey. When respondents were asked why they decided to ride in the winter, the most common response was “I started biking and I didn’t want to stop.” (That certainly rang true with me. When I started riding a bike in Toronto in the summer of 1979, I had no expectation of riding all year. But as the months rolled by I liked biking more and more. Soon a whole winter had gone by – and now it’s 38 winters.)

When summer-only cyclists were asked “What will take you off your bike?” sixty per cent cited poorly maintained infrastructure, said Desnick.

While cities around the world are learning that provision of protected bike lanes results in immediate boosts in cycling, winter cities are also learning that a substantial share of cyclists will happily ride through the winter, as long as bike lanes are maintained.

Thus cities such as Minneapolis and Montréal now regularly clear at least some bike lanes promptly after snowfalls, with bike-lane plows going out even before most streets are cleared.

The downtown Montréal neighbourhood of Villeray is home to many cyclists, and now has a protected, well maintained bikeway on Rue Boyer, shown at right. (Click image for larger view)

The leader in taking care of winter cycling facilities is the small city of Oulu, Finland, which hosted the first Winter Cycling Congress in 2013. Though the city is just 150 km south of the Arctic Circle, about 42% of its 200,000 residents keep cycling through the winter, said Winter Cycling Federation vice-president Pekka Tahkola.

The steadily cold winter actually makes cycling and path-maintenance easy, said Tahkola. Maintenance crews leave a thin layer of snow on the paths, this quickly becomes well packed, and cyclists have good traction even without using studded tires. With few thaw-freeze episodes, there is no reason to use road salt so paths and bikes stay clean.

Most temperate-zone cities face tougher challenges, exemplified by the freezing rain which turned to slush and then bumpy ice throughout Montréal during the conference – conditions that are increasingly common due to global warming.

Yet federal politicians, municipal staff, and planning firms from cities such as Calgary, Winnipeg and Copenhagen are helping to ensure that bike infrastructure is not forgotten when winter maintenance programs are designed – and winter ridership is increasing as a result.

Though city governments and planners play a crucial role in these efforts, often it is the activism of determined cyclists which prompts action. Becca Wolfson of the Boston Cyclists Union told the story of the city staffer who wrote that cyclists who want to bike in winter “are living in the wrong city”, and they only represent “.05% of the people” anyway. The response was a well organized campaign on Twitter, with pictures of the winter bike commuters holding signs saying “I am the .05%” or simply “#WinterBiker”. This year Boston is making it a high priority to clear major bikeways of snow.

Nadezda Zherebina discusses the growth of cycling in Russia which has resulted in regular bicycle parades in Moscow, including one in January 2017 when the temperature was –28°C. At the conclusion of the conference, it was announced that Moscow will host the 2018 Winter Cycling Congress. (Photo by Anne Williams, courtesy of Winter Cycling Congress Facebook page).

From downtown cores to the suburbs and beyond

Nor have winter bike activities been confined to major cities. Darnel Harris discussed a program to boost cycling in Toronto’s far-flung suburbs. These areas now tend to have lower housing costs than downtown, and are home to many people who can’t afford either condos or cars. Yet these areas also present major barriers to mobility and accessibility, with high-speed arterial roads, infrequent buses, and schools and stores that are too far from homes for walking to be a practical mode of transport. Among these communities, Harris said, cargo bikes have a particular appeal.

Other presentations dealt with a state-funded program to design biking infrastructure in rural Montana, and a project to connect two small villages in Finland with a safe and attractive bikeway.

Thank God It’s Friday!

But enough of traffic statistics and commuting modal share trends. Some of us also bike in the winter for pure fun, and the week ended with a special treat.

Though the conference officially closed at noon on Friday, about 25 lucky souls from at least five countries took a bus out of town to the great cycling facilities in Bromont. Here we were fitted with fat bikes before heading out on the snow-covered trails. Though we bundled up to stay warm in the –15°C temperature and stiff breeze, most of us soon started shedding layers as we pedaled up hills, slid around hairpin curves and dodged trees. As a conference finale, this was hard to beat.

Top photo: Although Montréal’s bike-share system, Bixi, does not operate in winter, conference organizers from Vélo Quebec made arrangements for participants to use Bixis in a variety of outdoor workshops. Here a group leaves the conference venue for a tour of Montréal’s maintained winter bikeways. (Photo by Anne Williams, courtesy of Winter Cycling Congress Facebook page).

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